Adding a pinch of spice to the weekend, Linux Mint has announced a new release of its Cinnamon desktop environment.
The latest version of the user-friendly shell will be the centrepiece of Linux Mint 17.1, the first point release in the distro’s new LTS approach, due later this month.
New In Cinnamon 2.4
Cinnamon 2.4 comes with a raft of welcome features, improvements and overall polish, such as reduced memory usage, new ‘Privacy’ and ‘Notifications’ settings and desktop wallpaper slideshows.
The official release notes highlight some of the bigger changes, including:
- Cinnamon desktop starts with “zoom” animation
- 30 memory leaks fixed as part of code review
- ‘Super+e’ shortcut opens ‘Home’ folder
- Desktop font can now be customised
- Timeout in ‘Logout dialog’ has been removed
- ‘Theme and Background’ settings redesigned
- Background slideshow support (plus new panel applet controller)
- ‘Notification and Privacy’ settings pane added
The Nemo file manager also benefits from the following improvements:
- Redesigned toolbar
- ‘nemo-emblems‘ extension supports adding emblems to folders
- Sidebar hover highlight effects
- ‘Smarter dynamic bookmark section’ in sidebar
- Folder colours can be quickly configured using nemo-folder-color-switcher (not yet released)
Upgrade to or Install Cinnamon 2.4 in Ubuntu
If you favour stability you should not upgrade to Cinnamon 2.4 in Ubuntu yet. New releases of Cinnamon arrive a month before Linux Mint for the specific purpose of testing, ironing out bugs and gathering feedback.
But if the above sounds more like a reason to try rather than avoid, Cinnamon 2.4 can be installed in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 14.10 using the following Cinnamon nightly PPA:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-nightly
Followed by:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install cinnamon
Already have Cinnamon installed? I’d advise running the following command in lieu of the one above. This will ensure that any package conflicts are automatically resolved by the package manager:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Installed and want shot? That’s easy enough; you can remove Cinnamon 2.4 and the bulk of its configuration files, dependencies and cruft by running this command:
sudo apt-get purge cinnamon
If you try it out, let us know what you make of the changes in the comments below — and be sure to share a screenshot or two, too!